If People Can Talk Out of Their Butts…

It’s typical of Western intellectual processes to get things backward. We have a long, fat record of theologians and teachers insisting that we have to lean more toward a literal rendering of Scripture. This legalistic approach has caused no end of folly when it is thrust backward into a language that is inherently parabolic and symbolic in nature. Hebrew seldom expresses anything literally.

But there are times it does come close to it. Scripture is loaded with references to Creation testifying of God. Our Western culture insists that this is a mere figure of speech, but I contend that the folks who wrote it would have meant it more literally.

This is where you stop reading if you aren’t ready to entertain the notion that a tree would talk to me and I could understand it on some level.

We have precious little lore on this in our Christian religion. That is, while Scripture seems to take it for granted, almost nothing in Church History addresses it without first adding a major taint of Western intellectual assumptions. And given that the English language is so very poorly suited to the task, we stand in the place of having to start from scratch rebuilding a lost legacy. Why do we struggle so hard with the story of Balaam’s onager talking to him about an angel standing in the road (Numbers 22)?

Over the past couple of years I’ve often tried to explain the doctrine of Two Realms, that we are inside of a constrained bubble that suffers distinct limitations that don’t exist outside of it. We are under the Fall in a realm where time and space are limitations upon us, but that God and His angels are not affected by such things. God’s Person is rooted outside of our realm of existence; He is in the Spirit Realm. We are in the Fallen Realm. I use language like that as parable, because Jesus set the pattern for discussing such things, relying on parables to convey things that can’t easily register in the intellect. He’s the one who established the basic principle in John 3 about Two Realms, and in other places told His disciples that parables were necessary to separate between those who are redeemed and those who are missing something critical in moral awareness.

I’ve also tried to describe a realm of awareness that bridges the chasm between this Fallen Realm and the Spirit Realm. I refer to it as the Moral Realm, a boundary layer we can touch that is reflected in all of Creation, but only with our heart-minds. God created all things and quite naturally we should assume that His Creation is a product of His moral character. Further, the Bible keeps saying flatly that Creation is a living thing in itself, so we shouldn’t struggle so hard with the idea that Creation operates by His moral character. I keep referring to Paul’s statement in Romans that all Creation is groaning with torment in hopes that some of us would catch on and start sensing this moral fabric of reality. We have the capacity to read this moral fiber in all things as the signature of God’s Person living in Creation.

So I struggle with the words to tell you that moral content is supreme, far more critical to our grasp on reality than any factual knowledge. The whole concept of “miracle” is that factual reality can be altered for moral purposes. Moral awareness trumps facts because facts can be changed; morality can only be observed. All the facts in the universe with a full grasp of how they interrelate will not answer any moral questions at all. Our Western obsession with facts is why there are so few miracles among Western Christians.

When I rode my bicycle (11 miles) to the spot out there where Aubrey McClendon crashed his SUV, I clambered around to see things from a perspective most folks wouldn’t bother trying to get. I climbed up the steep embankment where the construction crew had cut down into the earth to make the road pass under the interstate highway. All up the embankment grew a smattering of trees, shrubs and grasses native to this area and able to maintain a grip with their roots in the soil. Among them was an Oklahoma Redbud tree, standing near the top and among some other kinds of lightweight trees. The best I could do was capture with my camera one branch of this thing, and it’s mixed in tightly with all the other stuff growing there. I climbed around the end of the fence meant to limit access to the turnpike and took this picture from behind a fence, facing across the cut for Midwest Boulevard.

I’ve had communion with trees in the past and wrote about it on my other blog. I still have that polished oak stick in the mementos I keep near my computer. Our dear Sister Christine (Wildcucumber) writes about such things on her blog, but I didn’t get all of this from her. My experience is my own. This is the first time I have encountered anything quite like this: The tree seemed urgent to pass onto me some moral impression from that crash. Not factual information; I have no salacious secrets from McClendon’s life to reveal. On the other hand, who’s life does not include things they’d rather keep private? What the tree wanted me to get was something of the peculiar moral sorrow of the bigger picture. That tree watched McClendon’s life bleed and burn away in the wreckage of that SUV. Something about that whole event speaks of a critical moral truth about our world.

Maybe it will be awhile before I quite know what to say about that experience. As noted, I’ve communed with trees before, but this was like a heart-broken child asking someone to hold them for awhile. So my immediate reaction is that this crash carried a moral importance that I need to consider and pray about. It’s meant to result in a decision somewhere in the future that I might not make without that impression. Balaam eventually kept going down that road to Moab, but he definitely needed to stop and notice that there was something critical he needed to consider before he continued his journey. Would you want to claim our Creator no longer speaks through His Creation? We have all kinds of folks “talking out their asses” but we can’t take seriously something less spiteful?

At least some of you will be impressed to take this seriously. Let’s consider ways we can put this into words and develop a teaching that matches Scripture, because I, for one, would like to have all that God left us in Creation.